Front to back

The front row used to be the butt of all rugby jokes: they were slow, unskilled and often a bit thick. But, at the 2007 World Cup, something changed. They are now athletic and dynamic and, in Andrew Sheridan, England have the most feared player in the world. By Eddie Butler

It remains one of rugby union's articles of faith, enshrined in the charter of the International Rugby Board, that their sport must embrace people of all shapes and sizes. Rugby has been the chosen sport of some pretty prejudiced regimes down the years, but it has never been guilty of sizeism.

So what exactly to do with the squat and slow, the burly and bow-legged, who answered the call? The solution was to put them in the front row of the scrum, rugby's set piece with values peculiar to itself. This was not the lean-to of rugby league, not the armoured scrimmage of American football, but an unprotected, collective assembly of power.

The scrum used to be a dangerous place. Pushing was not the problem. Going forward rarely hurt anyone. But reverse gear is a terrible thing when tons of pressure is being applied. Before resigning themselves to the indignity and agony of going backwards, props and hookers invented new angles of self-protection, readjusting their limbs to impart new sideways forces that eased the assault on their vertebrae. Or they would just start a fight. The scrum became a battle within a battle and the low-slung, barrel-chested participants gained cauliflower ears and lost teeth for their cause.

These strange creatures became the public face of union. Ask a cartoonist to draw a rugby player and he will give you a prop or a hooker. If tennis for a certain generation was a photo of a young player walking away from the camera with a hand on her bare bottom, rugby at that time was a close-up of the face of Fran Cotton, a mountain of a prop, plastered in mud on the Lions tour to New Zealand in 1977.

The trouble was that while this special group of people were plying their trade, nobody else knew what they were doing. One minute they were standing up, wrapping their arms around each other; the next they had stooped, engaged with the opposition and disappeared. The public faces did invisible work.

Times changed and so did the work of the front row. Losing teeth was one thing, but too many players broke their necks at the scrummage. Danger was not so welcome in the professional age that arrived in 1995. Over the past 13 years, the scrum has been downgraded and new roles have been found for those idiosyncratic body shapes: lifting at the line-out, guarding the fringes of the ruck, tackling. Even running with the ball.

But as long as rugby adheres to that tenet of appealing to every shape, the scrum will be important. And a player who can lock up the scrum, who can remain immovable on his own team's put-in, will always be valuable. Carl Hayman, the New Zealand tight-head prop who joined Newcastle after last year's World Cup, is one of the best-paid players in the game. Handsomely rewarded and hardly a mark on him.

But paid for doing what? The scrum keeps its secrets. Props and hookers are ferrets down a rabbit-hole. It is sometimes best not to know what is going on down there. But I fear we too must enter the burrow. Please, stay close and do not be afraid.

If you enter the tunnel between the two front rows, the faces looking down at you with the strangest intensity will belong to the hookers in the middle. The hooker's mentality is determined by him being suspended, helpless, between his neighbours, arms around his props, crushed against opponents of equal size, with forces measured in tons per square inch working against him from all angles. He then has to wriggle into a position from which he can scrape the ball back with his right foot. There he is, hanging in muscle-bound space, striking for the ball.

Hookers can be scary people. I give you Brian Moore, the smallest (5ft 9in, 93kg) but loudest of a great England pack of the Eighties and Nineties, as a classic example. We once found ourselves in a bar in Rome, after doing a BBC commentary on an Italy-France game in the Six Nations. It was like walking into a Basque Country convention of front-row forwards. One by one, these large men came forward to examine and prod the talonneur rosbif who had spent years antagonising and beating the French pack. 'But you are so small,' they all declared.

One by one, in that bar, he took them on. Not at fighting, but one-on-one scrummaging. It was a masterclass. Perfectly balanced, he dipped and turned and twisted and squeezed, always able to waggle a foot loose for striking. It was like watching a flyweight in an old boxing booth - Jimmy Wilde at Jack Scarrott's in the 1920s, knocking out heavyweight all comers by the score. By the end, the Basques, sore of neck, red of nose where it had been rubbed into the sawdust, roared their approval of Le Pit-Bull.

Then there are the props. The loose-head has one shoulder outside the scrum. (Front-row forwards engage to the left of the head in front of them. Otherwise there would be a lot of cracked skulls.) He is still the driving force, though, when the opposition feeds the ball into the tunnel between the front rows. To help him, his own hooker performs a second task. Not striking, but pushing against the inside shoulder of the prop - the opposition tight-head - in front of them. To shift the scrum, hooker and loose-head will be looking to push forward and slightly up.

The tight-head, despite a flanker and a second-row lending their weight to a point just under his sizable backside, is a more solitary operator. He has no real support from his hooker. Yet, he is the cornerstone of the scrum on his own side's put-in. When the opposition loose-head and hooker come at him, he must counter what they are trying to do. That is, force them down.

Or, if not down, then across. Illegally. If the weight on him is too much, the tight-head can drop his outside elbow and swing his hips out of the scrum and drive inwards. Turning in. All the power from the other side is diverted from the straight and uppish to the sideways and useless.

There, we're back in the daylight. The horrible world of the front-row forwards is no place for tourists. But we had to go there, because of what happened in Marseille on a sunny Saturday at the 2007 Rugby World Cup.

It was the quarter-final between England and Australia. There was only going to be one winner, and it wasn't England. They were still in painfully slow recovery after a gruesome 36-0 defeat to South Africa in round two of their four pool games. Australia, on the other hand, were cruising: classy, confident and unbeaten.

And no longer afraid of the scrum. Australia had been trying to take the sting out of the set piece even before the 2003 World Cup semi-final between Australia and New Zealand, in which Wallaby prop Ben Darwin suffered a prolapsed disc in his neck. The scrum was slow and dull. Australia wanted to jazz up rugby. So, the laws on binding had been altered, especially with regard to where the tight-head could place his outside arm. A new instruction had been added to the referee's litany of: 'Crouch, pause, engage.' He now inserted a 'Touch' before the 'Engage,' to keep the front rows closer together and prevent them from charging at each other.

But on this one day at the World Cup in France, the scrum suddenly became sexy. England butchered Australia there and won the game. And to celebrate the return of the weird, carnal assembly of giant limbs, I go to see the colossus of scrummaging, Andrew Sheridan. To relive the day when England took the Wallabies' scrum apart.

We are meeting two-and-a-half months after the event, and Marseille's sun-kissed Stade Velodrome has given way to the rain-swept training fields of Sale Football Club on the banks of the Mersey, outside Manchester. Still, surely the 120kg, 6ft 5in, bull-necked, wasp-waisted model of athleticism knows exactly what he did on that day?

The big man pauses. His silence is not much quieter than his speech. Sheridan is one of life's more softly spoken giants.

'Well,' he says eventually, 'I haven't ever looked at the tape of the game. But I thought we won because we were more effective in the loose. With our counter-rucking. And that stopped them making any breaks.'

But Stirling Mortlock in the Australian centre made ground every time he touched the ball, you great lump. Where you shattered Australia was at the scrummage. You heaved them backwards. You could see doubt and then panic spread through their team, because of what you did to them at the scrum.

'Oh,' says the force. If it were possible to detect pride in an 'Oh', I think it is there.

'OK, maybe,' he finally acknowledges. 'Yes, I was pleased. But - and I'm not being modest for the sake of it here - you've got to understand something about scrummaging. It's not just me. It's an eight-man thing. Everybody must work at it and do their bit. There's so much analysis of the thing, so much video and dissection now that everyone is accountable.

'But ...' He pauses again. 'Yeah, I think Mark Regan enjoyed himself that afternoon. He's the one that does all the talking. You may have noticed. Hookers seem to be like that. The props - Phil Vickery, Matt Stevens and me - we don't tend to say a lot. Ronnie [Regan], though, did seem to be giving it some.'

Sheridan thinks he might be sounding a little disrespectful. 'Don't get me wrong. Ronnie can come over as a joker. But when it comes to training there's nobody more serious about what we're trying to do. It's the hooker who sets the whole scrum. Makes sure we're not staggered at the engagement. That our knees are together, that we're balanced. He sets the height. When you're tired you can forget to bend your knees and you engage too high. We need to keep reminding ourselves of what we've got to do. Otherwise, you can quickly end up in trouble.'

The game in Marseille, won 12-10 by the underdogs as their World Cup defence came to life, was not the first time Sheridan had led an assault on the Australia scrum. He had won an England cap as a replacement on the tight-head side of the front row against Canada in November 2004, and had gone on the Lions tour to New Zealand, but in the autumn of 2005 he played against the Australian tourists at Twickenham. And demolished them at the scrum. So much so that neither of his direct opponents finished the match and we ended up with the dreaded uncontested scrum.

Other props were naturally asked about this 26-year-old sensation. Sheridan, after all, was no ordinary prop, but a convert. With his club side of that time, Bristol, he had previously played either as blind-side wing-forward or in the second row.

Graham Price was among those asked. Capped 41 times by Wales, Price was the tight-head part of the great Pontypool front row that played for Wales in the golden age of the 1970s. Bobby Windsor was the hooker and Tony 'Charlie' Faulkner the loose-head.

Price was the quietest of the trio, the one who carried on playing international rugby into the 1980s. He played in 12 consecutive Lions Tests on three tours between 1977 and 1983. On his first, to New Zealand, he was on the right side of a scrum that was so powerful that the All Blacks reduced their personnel at the set piece in the final Test, in Auckland, to three. The theory on the All Blacks' side was that since it was impossible for their front row on their own to go back any faster than the full contingent of eight, the back-five forwards could be better used elsewhere.

The Lions pack of '77 - Fran Cotton, Peter Wheeler, Price, Bill Beaumont and Gordon Brown in the front five, with a mixture of Terry Cobner, Willie Duggan, Derek Quinnell, Tony Neary and Jeff Squire in the back row - were hailed as the finest scrummaging side ever to have visited New Zealand.

The All Blacks still won the Test, and the series, which just went to prove that even in those days, when the scrum was king of the rugby restarts, it wasn't everything. Just as in the age of Sheridan, when it has become the junior set piece, it can still count for something.

Price was asked about Sheridan in 2005. Being almost as quiet as his subject and disinclined to say anything obnoxious about anyone, the master thought long and hard. 'It's too early too tell,' he eventually delivered. 'For starters, you have to say he was up against a front row that wasn't exactly the strongest Australia have ever put out.' 'Sheridan overrated - Pricey' went the headlines in the Welsh press back then.

I ask my old clubmate at Pontypool what he thinks now. 'He's come on all right, hasn't he? He's a powerful man. Now don't make a weird headline out of that, will you.'

When Price first started playing for Pontypool as an 18-year-old he weighed 90kg. He barely had the strength to down three pints of orange squash after a game before trudging up the hill to his house.

'They were tough days, because even in the clubs around Pontypool - supposedly weaker teams, like Talywain, Garndiffaith and Pontypool United - you'd find an old hand in the front row, who'd played a bit of first-class rugby. You can imagine what they thought of a kid like me. I spent a lot of my apprenticeship with my head up my arse.

'When I first played for Wales in 1975 I used to lie about my weight,' Price continues. 'Bulk myself up for the match programme.'

Sheridan was never light. He was always solid and had a reputation as a ferocious weightlifter before he took up propping. But the learning process was still painful.

'It was just after Christmas in 2002,' Sheridan says. 'Peter Thorburn was coach of Bristol and he said we might as well give it a go. I'd been talking with Phil Keith-Roach, the old Rosslyn Park hooker and England scrummaging coach, who was - still is - passionate about front-row play. So, I suppose I was ready for the move.

'Still, it was a shock to the system when it happened. The first person I propped against was Rod Snow, the Canadian international at Newport. I found at half time I couldn't raise my chin off my chest.'

Sheridan decided that he needed to strengthen one particular part of his body if he was to survive in the front row. His neck. 'At loose-head, strength there is everything. It's how you lift the tight-head. You can have muscles everywhere else, but if your neck isn't strong you'll never get anywhere.'

He still works on the massive column of muscle that keeps his head on his shoulders. He uses a neck harness that resists movement in all directions. 'Mind you,' he adds, 'there's no substitute for live scrummaging. I'm still learning, and it's the only place, even in training. Pushing against a machine is nothing like the real thing.'

Price, too, had plenty of live practice: hours of scrummaging down behind the posts at the bottom end of Pontypool Park. This was his bread-and-butter work, under the tutelage of one of the great forward coaches of rugby, Ray Prosser. They worked on body position, straightness of back, the coordination of the collective dip and blast. A good scrum had a quiver to it as it flexed for lift-off. And if that didn't work, 'Then do whatever it fucking takes for it to work,' Pross would chuckle.

I remember preparations for one game in particular, a cup-tie against Cardiff. At tight-head they had an old rogue called John Dixon, who had been giving Pontypool trouble for years as a player for Abertillery. Mike Cairns had been his hooker at the Gwent valley club, an unusual soul because he always used to contest the opposition's put-in, rather than help his loose-head. It meant the Abertillery front-rows all had an individual style, and now one of them, Dixon, had gone to Cardiff. He was a turner-in.

Pontypool's answer was for Faulkner to grab Dixon's shorts and pull him even further round so he was almost sideways to us. The secret was to delay the collective drive until he was fully broadside to our front row. We practised for hours trying to time it right, so that we drove at full power into him. He was a wily old fox and we never quite managed to break his ribs.

Nowadays, self-policing has given way to grassing up. Opposition coaches are swift to point out discrepancies to referees. Sheridan, for example, was picked up by England's semi-final opponents, France, for what he had done with his left arm against Australia. That is, they noticed he did not always bind with it on his opposite number, but placed it against his own thigh as a brace.

'Did I?' says Sheridan. That old round-eyed innocence again. 'Well,' he adds, 'if I wanted to get picky, I could say, "What about the tight-heads?" They seem to get away with more than we do.'

No real change there, but if one aspect of scrummaging has been eradicated over the years it is the violence.

The Pontypool front row was broken up temporarily when Faulkner was injured in 1977. In at loose-head for Wales came Glyn Shaw of Neath. 'In many respects he was a really good player,' Price says. 'Especially in the loose. He was a great runner with the ball. But perhaps he wasn't such a good scrummager. Which was a pity, really, because our first game together was France away.'

France were scrum-crazy. The late Robert Paparemborde, a judo black-belt, was on the tight-head against Shaw, Alain Paco was hooker against Windsor, and the former heavyweight boxer Gérard Cholley - who once laid out four Scotland players in a single match - was against Price.

Behind them in the second row were the towering Michel Palmié - who would never play for his country again after an incident in 1978 when he threw a punch in a club match so hard that the recipient partially lost his sight - and Jean-François Imbernon. 'Well, you only had to look at those two to know what would happen if the scrum went down,' Price says.

'We were in trouble from the start. Paparemborde took the scrum so low on our put-in that Gareth Edwards could hardly put the ball in. Bobby had to strike it back with his head. Which was asking for trouble. He told me he had enough on his own plate. I'd have to look after myself.

'On my side ... well, if I got a reputation in later life for taking the scrum down when under pressure, it all started there. But if I hadn't collapsed it we'd have gone flying back. I had to take Cholley down, too, and make sure he lay between me and their second-rows. Or else they'd have booted my head off, too. So there was a bit of technique involved. Aye, I must say it was a bit hairy. I suppose the theory was in those days that as long as the ball came out the refs were prepared to let anything go.'

Thirty years later, at the World Cup quarter-final in Marseille, it was tense if not quite as perilous. At the first two scrums of the game, England began their cruel demolition work. But referee Alain Rolland penalised them. 'Yes, one against Phil Vickery and one against me. For a moment we did wonder ...' Sheridan says. England were on top, but being punished.

'I don't know if it then clicked with the ref, but at the third scrum we got the penalty. I think that as long as the referee over the course of the game rewards the dominant scrum I don't think we can complain.'

Props and hookers and scrummaging are cool. At the 2007 World Cup, England found power in their old pagan rituals. It may have been an unconscious rediscovery. It may truly be that the scrum's importance was lost on its prophets. But Andrew Sheridan and all those who could only ever be front-rowers shoved England forward. And if ever you find yourself in a bar and are tempted to pack down against the sex god's hulking frame, you may discover that his wide-eyed innocence only goes so far.

Prop idols: the front row by decade

The 1970s

The famous Pontypool front row - Bobby Windsor, Charlie Faulkner and Graham Price - played together in 19 games for Wales, finishing on the losing side only four times. Faulkner and Windsor developed their strength at a Newport steelworks. They would work a 12-hour nightshift, take a shower then get on the team bus. Another giant of the time was Fran Cotton. He inspired his North of England team to beat the touring All Blacks in 1979 with his response to the haka: 'Look at the big poofs dancing.'

The 1980s

Prop Gareth 'Coochie' Chilcott was essential to the all-conquering Bath side of the Eighties and epitomised the pre-professional era. After his last club game, he was asked how he was going to celebrate. 'I'm just off for a quiet pint - followed by 15 noisy ones.' His team-mate, hooker Graham Dawe, was one of the decade's unsung heroes but, due to the preference for Brian Moore, and injury-only substitutions, he was capped just five times for England.

The 1990s

Early in the decade, Leicester's 'ABC club' of Graham Rowntree, Richard Cockerill and Darren Garforth (so-called because the club have letters, not numbers, on the back of their shirts) emerged to help the Tigers dominate English club rugby.Jason Leonard, known for his sportsmanship (he was invariably the first player in the opposition's changing room after a match) gained his first England cap in 1990 and went on to break the record for most Test appearances.

The 2000s

For several years, Ireland were held up by hooker and captain Keith Wood, 'The Raging Potato', who put his body on the line with charging runs and bullish tackles. Along with Andrew Sheridan, the All Blacks' Carl Hayman is one of the best current props. Now in England, he claims he was attracted to Newcastle by the outdoor Northumberland life, but £6,500 a week (almost £1,500 a week more than team-mate Jonny Wilkinson) may have been a factor.